Last year I presented at the MDM Summit in San Francisco and wrote a blog post titled Big Data and MDM – Where Quantity Meets Quality. At the time, there was a fair amount of curiosity around how the massive data volumes being generated from social media sales and marketing channels would impact more “traditional” Master Data Management deployments and processes, put in place by enterprises over the last 10 years.
Some brief background about my interest in this topic: I previously ran product management and product marketing at Siperian, the MDM leader, which through acquisition is now Informatica MDM. I then moved into Cloud, xaaS and Big Data, joining my present company RainStor 4 years ago. During this journey, I mused in previous posts about the life of an enterprise sales person vs. one who sold SaaS offerings, voiced opinions about the MDM players and ecosystem, and kept a very close eye on the state of MDM, while positioning RainStor as a leader in the exploding Big Data market.
So let’s start with who Gartner thinks is the leader these days in MDM? Firstly, Gartner still tracks Customer MDM and Product MDM separately. With two excellent analysts Bill O’Kane and Andrew White jointly contributing on the state of play for each category’s Magic Quadrant. John Radcliffe, who previously blazed the trail for Gartner on Customer MDM has since retired.
- MQ for Product MDM (Nov 2012) – Has IBM and Oracle positioned as leaders
- MQ for Customer MDM (Oct 2012) – Has Informatica (previously Siperian) continuing to challenge IBM and Oracle
On the topic of Big Data and MDM, a tremendous amount has been written about the topic since my presentation at MDM Summit. Here is a sample set:
- Big Data and MDM More Coupled Than Expected – Computerworld
- Master Data in Big Data Management – EMC
- Master Data Management for Big Data – IBM
- Informatica brings MDM to Big Data, Social Cloud and Mobile Computing – Informatica
- MDM a Foundation for Big Data Analysis – Oracle
Over the last 10 years, companies have made MDM a priority and from a technology vendor’s perspective a multi-billion dollar market. Not only for the core MDM software, but all the touch points of hardware, data integration, analysis and movement tools, and the significant data governance and architectural consulting that accompany a typical multi-year MDM deployment project.
With Big Data and synonymously Hadoop continuing to be a hot topic, the intersection of the two is reaching fever pitch and the big players all realize that they must align their products, strategy and marketing to meet the interest and growing demand.
So while my current company RainStor, which provides a Big Data database doesn’t directly impact MDM and core reference data, since the scale and volumes still dwarf those of transactional and data warehouse/analytic data, I continued to keep a keen eye on developments with more than a passing personal interest.
As ever, feel free to comment or drop me a line if you’d like to have a discussion about this very intriguing topic. BTW, MDM and Big Data may be interesting, but I actually believe there is a related topic of even greater interest. Stay tuned; I may follow on soon with my thoughts in that area. J